Ninette de Valois: Women’s History Month in Dance, 2021
Women’s History in Dance, 9. “Women make the best pioneer workers,” said Ninette de Valois after she had handed over the company she had founded, the Royal Ballet, to Frederick Ashton.[1] When you remember the work of Ruth St Denis, Martha Graham, Marie Rambert, Hanya Holm, Lucia Chase, Celia Franca, Peggy van Praagh, Janet Reed, Barbara Weisberger, Stoner Winslett, and others in founding dance companies that survived them, you see how right she was.
But De Valois (1898-2001) - helped and doubtless inspired by Lilian Baylis, director of the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells Theatres - was something more. She also founded the schools that are today’s Royal Ballet School and Turkish Ballet School, and the company that is today’s Birmingham Royal Ballet, and ran them all simultaneously for many years. She choreographed efficiently (some even consider two of her ballets to be enduring masterpieces); she taught; and she ran her two British ballet companies through decades when they toured nationally and internationally. From 1949 to 1963 (year of her retirement), the Royal (or Sadler’s Wells) Ballet became the most prestigious company in the West, touring North America and elsewhere with immense influence and éclat (the touring continued after her retirement). When visiting Turkey, she also conducted secret diplomacy for the British (she would refer to “my Mata Hari side”[2]).
Without drawing attention to it, she managed all this while sustaining a long and successful marriage to Dr Arthur Connell. (She would refer to “my husband the doctor”[3]. During the Second World War, when her company was dancing a punishing regimen, she also made time to work occasionally as her husband’s receptionist.[4]) She did all this while living modestly, taking low salary, living without grandeur in a London flat away from the city centre. (She and her husband were at least fascinated by Sufism. At one period, everyone at the Royal Ballet School would be required to vacate the building one evening per week, so that de Valois and Connell could host a Sufi gathering.[5]) Although she was fond of her nephews and nieces, she arranged for the posthumous revenue from her productions to go to the Royal Ballet School.[6] (I interviewed her once, in her flat. Her husband was close to death in the next room - he died not long after - but she was cheerfully determined to answer my questions as best she could, and with great delight followed the interview by feeding me some cake in the kitchen.)
She was notoriously self-contradictory. I once asked Barbara Fewster, longterm senior teacher at the Royal Ballet School whether it was true that de Valois, on seeing how Frederick Ashton was deploying a step in his choreography, revised the School’s teaching of that step accordingly. Fewster replied “She may have done - but she may then have changed her mind about it a month later.” Fewster then told me of a time when de Valois, after a visit to Russia, told the staff at the Royal Ballet School that cou de pied was now to be a different position. One male member of her staff thought about this carefully over the weekend; at the start of the next week, he gave her his resignation, explaining that he could not change his teaching of cou de pied. De Valois accepted his immediate resignation; he left. A month later, she announced that cou de pied was to return to its original position. She did not reinstate that teacher, however.[7]
She was a highly influential teacher, and yet her teaching varied drastically over the years. Julia Farron, in her old age, recalled that de Valois’s teaching before 1945 “was really all below the hip - and really all beneath the knee”; “anything we learnt about épaulement we learnt from Fred (Ashton).”[8] Yet the young Lynn Seymour and Antoinette Sibley, as senior Royal Ballet School students in the late 1950s, were deeply impressed by de Valois’s pronounced emphasis on épaulement[9]; and Lesley Collier, as a senior student around 1964, remembers de Valois’s attention above all to expansive arms[10]. Some dancers[11] recall times when de Valois’s teacherly attention to musicality was fascinating and useful; others[12] have described times when she could be maddeningly unmusical, trying to set combinations that had no rhythmic connection to the music she had requested.
She was Irish - her accent became Irish when she was emotional, even in public addresses - and she had worked with Yeats, whom she greatly admired; yet she took pride in saying that her company danced ballet with “English style”[13]. (This gave offence to some.[14]) She was christened Edris Stannus; to old friends she signed herself “Edris”[15]. The name “Ninette de Valois” had been chosen for her, when she began a stage career, by her mother, who claimed that there was some family connection to the de Valois dynasty[16]; even if this had been true, it was thoroughly pretentious, since the de Valois line of monarchs had ended over three centuries earlier. During the Second World War, she was given the admiring nickname ”Madam” by her dancers; people differed on whether it should be spelt “Madame” or “Madam”[17], but it was invariably pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable.
On founding the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1931, she wrote, inspiringly, that it would fail in its mission if it did not survive its original director and the next several directors.[18] What is less well known is that she, when retired but still revered by the boards of the Royal Opera House, actively machinated in 1968 to force the replacement of Frederick Ashton, her successor, with Kenneth MacMillan[19]; and then in 1977 to force MacMillan’s resignation, by planning her own new Sleeping Beauty production to replace bjs 1973 one (he was not consulted)[20]; and then in 1985 to arrange the resignation of Norman Morrice, MacMillan’s successor[21]. In each of these cases, she went over the director’s head to the board to ensure her plan was enacted.
Her vision, however, was more limited than is usually acknowledged. Frederick Ashton’s Symphonic Variations (1946) was immediately acclaimed as a breakthrough masterpiece; she never agreed.[22] In 1948, when his masterpiece Scènes de ballet, the creation of which he remained proudest, was approaching its premiere, she wrote to her old colleague Joy Newton, “We still await a master in this country.”[23] In 1980, she told an American scholar that Leonide Massine had been “the greatest choreographer of the century.”[24]
Nonetheless it was de Valois who enduringly changed international ballet history by establishing the Maryinsky ballet classics (Giselle, Coppélia, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake in particular) as the backbone of ballet repertory.[25] No earlier Western companies had followed this policy. Because of the Sadler’s Wells and Royal Ballets, many have followed suit to this day.
Here, too, she was self-contradictory. In general she insisted that her dancers were faithful to the steps and patterns that her company had acquired from Nicholas Sergueyev, the former Maryinsky régisseur.[26] Yet she herself changed several of these, most obviously in 1954 when she rearranged aspects of Coppélia, giving Swanilda six girlfriends rather than eight (remarkable when you observe that their Act One theme and variations contains the ballet’s best choreography) and placing Act Three in the village square of Act One, shrinking its scale.[27] Royal Ballet swan-maidens to this day do a swan port de bras that de Valois installed in the mid-1950s after a visit to Soviet Russia; perhaps she thought the Russian swan arm movement was a more authentic rendition of Lev Ivanov’s choreography, but evidence shows she was wrong.
Few of her achievements were more remarkable than that of bringing her company to sensational triumph in New York when it was only eighteen years old, a triumph that was then repeated and consolidated with biennial returns[28] for the next twenty-one years. In public, de Valois took pride in these American successes. In private, she wrote to Newton “I hate hate hate America.” [29]
What are we to make of this formidable woman? She suffered migraines so bad that they sometimes hospitalised her, terrified everyone with her tempers and abrupt manners, and yet was a constant example of endearing good humour and unpretentious simplicity, loving to laugh at herself. When the Friends of Covent Garden honoured her eightieth birthday in 1978 with a lunch at the Dorchester Hotel, she was flanked by Kenneth Clark and Sacheverell Sitwell at a table that also included the ballerinas Svetlana Beriosova, Lesley Collier, Beryl Grey, Pamela May, Nadia Nerina, Lynn Seymour, Moira Shearer, and Antoinette Sibley. After Sitwell and Clark had made speeches, she rose, thanked everyone, and then, reminding them that they were Friends of Covent Garden, spoke of the Opera House she loved, and urged them to give money where it was needed. (“We need better dressing rooms!”) Her words were so movingly selfless that I found myself brushing away tears, only to notice that all those ballerinas were doing the same.
Saturday 6 March
[1] Ninette de Valois, quoted p.191 of Frederick Ashton, a choreographer and his ballets. edited by Zoë Dominic and John Selwyn Gilbert. George G.Harrap, London, 1971.
[2] Richard Glasstone, speaking at the Ninette de Valois conference, Royal Ballet School, 2011. Glasstone worked with de Valois in Turkey in the 1960s.
[3] Mary Clarke, conversations with AM.
[4] Mary Clarke, The Sadler’s Wells Ballet, 1956.
[5] Glasstone, 2011 de Valois conference.
[6] For the Boston Ballet’s production of The Sleeping Beauty, posthumously based on de Valois’s 1977-1992 Covent Garden production with supplementary choreography by Frederick Ashton, half the royalties (de Valois’s half) go to the Royal Ballet School, the other half (Ashton’s) to Ashton’s chief heir, his nephew Anthony Russell Roberts. Since Ashton had also contributed uncredited coaching to the ballet, especially to the role of Aurora, this may be a fairer division of revenue than at first appears.
[7] Conversation with Barbara Fewster, 1990s.
[8] Conversations with Julia Farron, 1997-2006.
[9] Interviews with Antoinette Sibley and Lynn Seymour, AM on behalf of Voices of British Ballet, 2014.
[10]Interview with Lesley Collier, July 2015, AM on behalf of Voices of British Ballet., Unfortunately, the audio recording failed.
[11] Glasstone, conversations with AM.
[12] Notably Patricia Hutchinson McKenzie: conversations with AM, early 1980s.
[13] Notably in her speech onstage at the Royal Ballet gala in honour of her eightieth birthday, July 1978.
[14] In particular to the Anglo-American critic Dale Harris: many conversations with AM from 1979 onward.
[15] For example, her 1948-1956 letters to Joy Newton, in the collection of the Royal Ballet School.
[16] Kathrine Sorley Walker, Ninette de Valois, Idealist without illusions, Dance Books, 1987, p. 5.
[17] Margot Fonteyn in her Autobiography (W.H.Allen, 1975), writes that de Valois signed her letters to Fonteyn “Madame”; Mary Clarke, editor of Dancing Times and 1956 historian of The Sadler’s Wells Ballet, invariably spelt it “Madam”.
[18] 1931 document quoted by Mary Clarke, The Sadler’s Wells Ballet, op. cit.
[19] See Julie Kavanagh, Secret Muses, the life of Frederick Ashton, Faber & Faber 1996, pp. 499-503. Richard Glasstone has often testified that de Valois, when staying in his house in Turkey in 1968, placed daily phonecalls to David Webster and John Tooley in which she firmly worked for Ashton’s replacement in 1970 by Kenneth MacMillan.
[20] Deborah MacMillan, conversation, 2002. MacMillan did indeed announce his resignation from the directorship suddenly in spring 1977; de Valois’s new production of The Sleeping Beauty did indeed open the Royal Ballet’s 1977-1978 season at Covent Garden.
[21] The late Bryan Robertson (1925-2002) was on the Royal Ballet board; he described these 1985 events to a mutual friend, who reported them to AM.
[22] See de Valois, quoted in p. 336 of Kavanagh, op. cit.. In a 1952 letter to Joy Newton, de Valois scornfully complains of George Balanchine’s plotless ballets for New York City Ballet, comparing them to “Fred <Ashton> at his worst” immediately after the War.
[23] De Valois, letter to Newton, 1948.
[24] Mary Anne de Vlieg, conversation with AM, autumn 1980.
[25] Beth Genné, “Creating a Canon”, Dance Research, 1997-1998.
[26] Fonteyn (Autobiography), Moira Shearer (interview in Barbara Newman, Striking a Balance), and Nadia Nerina (Ballerina) are among those who record de Valois’s insistence on honouring the details of the text of the Maryinsky classics.
[27] These numbers are shown in Covent Garden programmes for Coppélia before 154 and after. See Covent Garden database on line. In the early 1940s, George Balanchine told Edwin Denby (Denby, Dance Writings) that all his choreography was inspired by the Act One theme and variations for Swanilda and her friends; in New York City Ballet’s 1974 production of Coppélia, Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova gave Swanilda eight friends.
[28] Some of the company’s transatlantic tours lasted five months. The five-month tour of 1950-1951 was so lucrative during the period of postwar austerity that the company was congratulated and thanked in Parliament for the revenue it brought to Britain. Sometimes, as in 1949 and 1950-1951, the company even toured to North America (always starting in New York) in consecutive seasons.
[29] Letter to Newton from New York, 1950.
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Alastair Macaulay
